What Direction Should the Game Take?

[Mew]

Before I address the final part of this response, I just want to say I am happy to touch up this post even more if you ask for it.

Yes, please do.

But I want to address some of the other things you've said in your reply so I'll start off by addressing your opinion on hiding and camping taking priority over tanking. First off, as I said before, this would be an extremely dumb thing to do. This in itself would create imbalance for the gamemode itself and leave the majority of the community in the dark.

Incoherent/illogical points here. Dismissing my opinion as "dumb" isn't really a stonewall argument either. Plus, what do you mean by it would "leave the majority of the community in the dark"? This just seems like filler you want to pretend is an argument but fails to actually argue anything because of how meaningless it is.

Most of the people who play this game play it to enjoy the PvP experience. The gamemode itself is a PvP oriented gamemode that was designed to allow people to face off against one another with horde like mechanics. Saying that hiding and camping should be the main priority in itself goes against what the gamemode is.

The game is a survival-based gamemode with PvP elements. Bold of you to assume the point of the game was always to fight foes.

However, that's only if we take into effect that complete and absolute bias was held against tanking. Which as I said multiple times, that should never be the case.

And just because you said it multiple times doesn't make it a fact.

Something similar can be said about how you view what you call a " game philosophy argument with absolutely zero correct answer". From a game development standpoint this is incorrect. The aim of a game designer and game developer is to achieve balance between all aspects of the game based on the main focus of the game. If a game is PvP oriented then the main focus should be on the player vs player experience. If a game is PvE oriented then the main focus should be on achieving balance and scaling between the entities (enemies) and the player itself. If the game is classified as a sandbox then the main focus should be on giving the player the tools necessary to create their own enjoyable experience. Saying that there are zero correct answers is a falsification of the statement "There is a solution to every problem".

I don't really know what the point of this section is. It again seems more like you got upset at me for not wanting tanking buffed unnecessarily and resorted to saying I don't understand game design. I am sorry I offended you with my opinion about tanking's state. I do question how you say game developers should strive for balance but want to buff a balanced part of the game. I wonder who's actually biased here...

I don't care about this Cleave paragraph, and I think whatever you talked about at the end I have covered above.

Anyhoo, that's the end of this reply to what you've said. Also you should consider not adding expressive quotes like that into your response. It just seemed a bit immature and provocative so I didn't really know how to respond to it without just saying this? Anyway, That's all from me, I still want to talk about a lot more here but I have once again run out of time for now. Sorry for the long post once again and I hope this was enough ^-^

No, I will add expressive quotes as I please if I feel they convey my opinion of what you have said. For example, for this post I think a fitting quote is "god I can't believe anyone would dare read my several paragraph response and disagree with me. Let me write more in the hopes I overwhelm them."

split into two posts because character limit

 

[Erupture]

@Agent40 you're gonna have to justify to me adding surge or fire mind back because those two perks were the reasons mci 2.0 felt shit other than broken vampire; they're obscenely strong for tanking and in my eyes add nothing to the game outside of buffing commanders, which I really don't think is needed.

a lot of your post comes off as just "I want to tank more why can't I tank like I used to AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA", which is fine, and you address certain tanking-related points that I agree with enough, but a more or less full reversion to 2.0 in terms of what survivors have at their disposal to tank seems unreasonable to me. surge + fire mind and the other tools survivors have at their disposal enables a toxic environment, particularly for newer players, because it becomes so easy to snowball games as a commander and punishes smart play from infected (i.e. group fuck a commander instead of just one by one running at them and praying they're bad).

kevlar I'm cool with adding back just because I've always felt the game should be more about hiding/camping rather than tanking, but that's a game philosophy argument with absolutely zero correct answer so :shrug:

Maybe firemind would be toxic, but a less powerful version of surge would be very helpful rn. Maybe if after u killed an infected, you strength one for 3 seconds. At the moment, it is really hard to kill infected in large groups so a perk to help kill hordes would be very nice lol

 

[AshlynSwitch]

Okay so I wrote this up the other day in a conversation I was having about the game, and was planning on editing it to post it here, but I don't have the time so I'm just going to post it as-is.

TL;DR at the bottom


My thoughts on it are:
-I agree the old maps are unbalanced and un-fun. I would be very interested to see the analytics on overall win% and map win%
-I think there was some back and forth on whether hiding or tanking is worse for new players, and I think that exposes a fundamental flaw of the gamemode.
Both really suck for new players. In a hiding meta, new players join, see nobody because they don't have an understanding of the maps and where the hiding spots are, and then leave. In a tanking meta, they are killed 10s of times before killing a commander, which makes the game feel unfair, and they leave.

My proposed solution to that fundamental flaw would be to implement a very robust infected progression system, so new players still feel they're accomplishing something while they get rekt by commanders waiting outside spawn. This would need them to be able to unlock kits for free, which the lack of I think is the largest flaw in the server right now. While there can be a huge back and forth about whether or not tanking or hiding should be the focus of the game, I think the problem can be bypassed by doing something else. A huge revamp to the prestige shop would eliminate this all together. I've talked about this before and I know you have heard some of it, but right now there is 1 support Prestige perk, and the rest are all very heavily combat focused, with the main focus being on tanking.

While some of these have been nerfed to hell, that doesn't change the fact that there isn't really much of an option. I would propose a prestige shop with a lot of different directions to take your survivor.

Movement where you focused on dodging/running from zombies and not getting cornered.

Support, where you could give boosts to your teammates and focus more on debuffing infected than damage.

Tanking, where you were focused on being able to stay in combat for as long as possible. And more perks like marksman that more solidly defined your role in the map/game.

Bringing the game into a more customization focused development, I feel, would do the game a lot of good. I don’t think you can really have a game where you just level up and get small stat bonuses with no choices in playstyle change anymore. Maybe in 2012, but in 2020 people want the ability to tailor their game experience.

In my head, the ideal system would actually be a skill tree found in traditional RPGs, specing into different styles of play with unlocks being gated behind progression, but I do understand that this would be a huge shift for MCI players, and probably isn’t a good idea given how much people dislike change.

As for commander tax and commander camping punishment, I feel like once again this problem can be solved by changing something else, namely giving people an actual reason to prestige. To be honest, the current prestige shop is laughable in terms of what it offers, and I feel that causes many people to stay at commander for a longer time than if they had actual goals to move towards. I do believe that commander shouldn’t be a rank that people stay at for very long. You should get a brief power spike, and then start again with something cool that changes your play experience. With so many commanders in the game, playing as infected is a terrible experience. Forcing the people who stay at commander to have an actual downside by missing out of very valuable and most importantly fun prestige perks would cause so much less commanders to be in game at one time, and drastically improve infected QoL

As for proposed prestige perks and changes, I wholeheartedly agree, but only if they’re within a revamped system. Adding cleave today won’t change the game, the pshop will still be ass and maybe the top 20 players on the server will see a minor improvement, but for most it’ll be no different. To be honest, the gamemode could use a lot of work, and with the current rate of content roleout, I feel the devs are missing out on some of the gamemode's potential

TLDR;
-Maps need to be balanced based on analytics, certain maps are heavily unbalanced.
-Tanking vs. Hiding isn’t the issue, it’s that new players have a shit time
-To improve that shit experience, there NEEDS to be meaningful infected progression, including unlocking kits for free with not that much investment (Play for 3 days, get the first kit, so they see the direction they can go)
-No changes to prestige perks will fix the game, the pshop needs a total overhaul, with the ability to take your survivor into many different ways of playing the game, other than just “I do more damage” “I take less damage”
-The current state of games in general does not support a game where for 95% of it you have no control over the progression of your character. There needs to be more customization before you hit 1st prestige
-Commander tax/camping punishment concerns would go away with a good Pshop
-A faster content roleout cycle is drastically needed, especially if it caters to non-donors